Husbands and Other Strangers. Marie Ferrarella

a memory and we can go from there. I’ve got to be there for that. Got to give her every opportunity to remember me. To remember us.” He struggled to keep the hopelessness from absorbing him. “Maybe I’ll show Gayle the wedding pictures.”

      “Might just do the trick,” Sam agreed cheerfully, a strained smile pasted on his lips.

      “You’re a lousy actor, Sam,” Taylor told him. “But thanks for trying.”

      He realized that Sam was no longer listening to him. Instead he was looking at something over his shoulder. Taylor turned around and saw that Gayle had emerged from out of the curtained area, wearing a white pair of impossibly short shorts and a white-and-pink-checkered blouse that tied above her midriff.

      Her hair had long since dried and was hanging about her face and shoulders in tiny curls. She’d always told him that she hated the way that looked. He thought she looked beautiful.

      Except for the hairstyle, she looked exactly the way she had when she’d stepped onto Sam’s sloop this morning.

      And yet she was different. She wasn’t his Gayle anymore.

      But she would be, he vowed. She would be.

      “God, I look like Orphan Annie,” she complained, spiking her fingers through her hair and trying to pull it straight. It was an exercise in futility.

      “Orphan Annie she remembers,” Taylor muttered under his breath.

      But Gayle heard him. “Sure, I used to read the comic strip every day when I was a kid,” she said as she moved closer to Jake and away from him.

      Closer to what was familiar. Away from what was not.